Chapter 5 — Red Tide Arithmetic
Morning did not arrive so much as confess that it had been here all along. The bells of Lunaris carried three patient notes through the house, climbed the stairs, and laid themselves gently against my door. I dressed before the last echo slid into the cracks of the wood and found Father already at the end of the corridor, sleeves folded back as if the day had requested access to his forearms.
"Two errands," he said. "One by sunlight, one by moonlight. You'll keep your mouth shut for both and open it only if you can add something the day can spend."
"Is that an order?"
"A hope," he said, which in his mouth meant the same thing.
By sunlight: the square. The ferrymen and boatwrights had agreed—under duress of public opinion and Father's quiet threats—to read their accounts aloud on market's last day. Word spread faster than prices. When we reached the fountain, a small crowd held itself with the energy of people who expect to be either bored or deeply satisfied and can live with either so long as there is a spectacle.
The master of ferries stood with his ledger like a priest with a text that had grown heavy from being too often believed. The chair of the boatwrights planted her feet as if she were about to argue with both gravity and habit and had reasons to expect to win. A clerk cleared his throat loudly enough to become part of the agenda.
"Repairs," the chair began, voice even. "Planks, two hundred and six lengths. Nails—"
"Nails have lengths?" someone called.
"Today they do," she said, and a ripple of laughter made the math friendlier.
They read. Numbers marched out into the square, stripped of their privacy. A murmur settled like dust between items. When a sum didn't add, it was corrected before the crowd had time to become rude. When a charge looked like a favor disguised as necessity, the chair read it unflinchingly and the master nodded once, which in the dialect of guilds means you're right, and I'm not sorry, and we won't do it again because you caught us.
An old woman I recognized—the kindling-bearer who had out-argued the Solharan scholar—stood with her bundle tucked like a baby and watched as if supper depended on the decimals. It might have. If the levy was theft by another name, it would be her coins stolen. If the fund was real, her grandchildren crossed the river when they needed to, not when their hunger permitted.
When it was over, the master of ferries looked thinner but relieved, as though he'd sweated out a fever that had not yet learned humility. Father thanked them both with a nod that granted no absolution and gave no insult.
As the crowd unknotted itself, the Solharan scholar materialized near the statue with a slate under his arm. "You see?" he said to whoever would listen. "Transparency induces stability."
The kindling-bearer snorted. "Soup induces stability. But I'll allow that numbers help if you keep them outside where they can't breed in the dark."
I half-smiled and pretended not to be listening. Father cut me a look that said: You opened your mouth exactly the right amount this morning. Do not speak now and ruin your score.
We took the long way toward the river. The street had learned our faces and offered the small courtesies it kept in its pockets: a door held just long enough to be kindness rather than performance, a shopkeeper's nod that said you are someone who returns, a guard who didn't shift at all because he had already made the room we needed to pass through when he saw us a half-street away.
By the red-brick building near the wharf, my stomach did the small, stubborn twist it had taught itself. The sign's paint remained fresh enough to seem proud. Indenture Office. No chains, no rough hands—only quills and the tenor of weary people pretending they were making choices. I didn't stop. Father gave me the mercy of silence and a ratifying step that matched mine. Some fights require more than indignation and one boy's posture.
We turned the corner and made a second stop equally practical and offensive in a different way: a counting house where surplus grain became figures that did not feed anyone. Father asked for a ledger "on loan" and the clerk handed it over with the resigned speed of someone who couldn't afford to refuse a man who knew what to ask for. We brought it outside and sat on the steps. Father traced lines down pages with the same fingertip he used on maps and road petitions.
"What do you see?" he asked finally.
"More stored along the river than last year," I said. "Less in the upper wards. Prices stable below and creeping above. If there's an early frost, the wards that think money is the same as food will find out they were wrong."
"And?"
"The indenture line passes through here," I said, tapping a number that would be meaningless without a different ledger beside it. "Someone buys the security of full bellies by selling futures of empty ones."
"You're certain?"
"No," I said. "But the numbers are flirting."
He grunted, which from him meant interest with room for doubt. "We'll request the oversight rosters. See if the same names persist. If a gate ever comes close, people who eat well make better decisions."
"Not always," I muttered.
"True," he said. "But if we're going to fail, let's not do it hungry."
We returned the ledger with the unbothered entitlement of men who planned to borrow it again. In the lane, a beastkin courier ran past, long ears pinned back by speed and purpose. He carried a blue ribbon around his arm—the city's quiet mark for a message that belonged to now. He didn't slow at the corner. I marked his passing in my head, the way I have started collecting small data about the city to feed to a future I cannot yet name.
We had time enough before moonlight's errand to pretend we were ordinary. Rook beat the pretense out of me with the flat of a practice blade and the sincerity of a man who thinks bones are wiser than opinions. "Again," he said, each time I completed a form with too much pride and not enough clarity. "Foot under you, not behind you. Head up. The world sits on your spine; don't make it chase you."
He rapped my knuckles when I anticipated. I accepted the sting the way a student accepts a tutor who charges in pain rather than coin and is, annoyingly, worth the price.
Mother found me afterward with a small jar of salve that smelled of mint and discipline. She set my hands in hers and applied the balm as if my skin were parchment that needed softening before it would take ink properly.
"Tonight?" she asked Father without looking up.
"Watch duty," he said. "Red tide likely. The river's been humming since dawn."
Mother's mouth tightened by the smallest possible degree. "He's still—"
"Small," Father finished. "And learning. He'll stand where he can be useful and not interesting."
"I am right here," I said.
"Yes," Mother said gently. "That is the entire point."
By dusk the city put on its night-face—lamps waking one by one, streets narrowing their ambitions, the cathedral catching the last light and breaking it on its facets into fragments that landed like good omens on the square. We reported to the east parapet, where the river made a habit of testing our confidence. Wardens lined the wall, their armor more practical than proud. A stonekin foreman oversaw the placement of sand barrels with a reverence I had only ever seen in men who had made something with their hands and were prepared to fight anyone who disrespected it.
"Stay beside me," Rook said, which I translated as you may be marginally helpful and I am personally responsible for the margin.
The watch captain—a woman whose hair had been shorn so short it looked like a decision—walked the line naming the conditions we'd been taught to attend to: "Iron taste on the tongue, lights that refuse to flicker or flicker in sequence, river pulling wrong, birds sitting too still, silence where there should be mice." She said them as inventory, not prophecy. I repeated them in my head until my mouth tasted faintly of fear and metal.
A River-born team checked moorings and listened to the water with palms flat against the stone. A pair of elves affixed wire chimes at intervals along the parapet—not because music helps, but because it tells you which parts of the world stopped believing in wind. A beastkin tracker crouched, nostrils flaring, face tilted the way animals tilt it when scent provides more data than sight. An apprentice with a Book Sigil damply bright on her palm held a ledger that wasn't full of numbers; she recorded oddities like a priest collects names of the sick. No one was clever. Everyone was useful.
Downriver, lanterns had been set at regular distances by men who liked patterns. Rook made a small sound in his throat. I knew that sound; it meant his body had seen a thing his words hadn't caught up to yet.
"What?" I asked.
"Too even," he said. "Looks good. Might not be."
The Solharan scholar's chalk moons flashed in my head. Waveforms. Harmonics. Patterns can either soothe or amplify. If the gates breathed with a rhythm that disliked symmetry, then tidy spacing might not be useful so much as encouraging.
"Stagger the lanterns," I said before my senior judgment had time to strangle my junior bravery. "Not random—long, short, long. Break the line's pride."
Rook raised an eyebrow. He didn't dismiss me. He looked to the captain.
She didn't ask for proofs. She asked for time. "How long to shift?" she called to the lamp team.
"Ten minutes if no one argues," came the answer.
"Then don't argue," she said, and the lamps began to move in a stuttering ballet that made the street look briefly drunk and then, somehow, righter.
The river made its decision at full dark. Not dramatic. No bombast. The current simply… leaned. A taste of iron touched my tongue like an old coin sucked by a stubborn child. The chimes said nothing. That was the talking.
"Positions," the captain said, and the word settled muscle onto bone up and down the parapet.
At the drydock corner, air wrinkled. Not a tear. A suggestion. The suggestion became ambition. Space pinched into a shape that was not a shape and then un-pinched in a way that made my eyes water because my head insisted no such un-pinching should be possible. A thin band of not-light licked out and recoiled, as if regretting its own boldness.
"Hold," the captain said, because the worst thing to do to a city is panic it.
The water-speaker from yesterday's fire stood two places down. She lifted her hand and drew a wet line between the dock's lip and the first lantern. The water obeyed like a tired soldier. The not-light kissed it and hissed. The hiss sounded insulted.
A warden tossed a chain weighted with hooks toward the wrongness—a crude tool I've seen used to "stitch" small breaches by giving the air permission to remember where it had been. The chain bit nothing and fell. The not-light reached again, tasting for symmetry. It didn't find it. The staggered lamps offered no rhythm to drink.
"Again," the captain said quietly. The second throw bit air that didn't exist until it had been asked to by a question cast with confidence. The chain sang very faintly, a tune the elves' chimes recognized enough to compliment. The wrongness shivered, offended that we had named it. The water-speaker traced another line. The Beastkin tracker snarled softly because sometimes you lend your city your animal and it returns the favor.
Then the air unfolded. The river exhaled. The chimes remembered how to be disorganized. The iron taste receded leaving behind the ordinary copper of gums you've chewed too long.
We did not cheer. The parapet replaced its breath. The captain said, "Reset," in a tone that told everyone to praise themselves privately if they must. A merchant two streets over shouted at a boy about a crate of lemons that would have spoiled anyway. The night reassembled itself around the lack of disaster.
Only then did the captain look at Rook and then at me. "Why stagger?" she asked. Not a challenge. A request she could file for later.
"Patterns carry power," I said, voice steadier than I felt. "If the gate wanted a beat, we refused to give it a drummer."
"Poetry," she said, but without mockery. "Fine. We'll keep the drunken lanterns until someone sobers the math."
She walked away before my pride could make me ridiculous. Rook bumped my shoulder. "You opened your mouth," he said. "It did not embarrass your face."
Down on the quay, the merchants who'd been forced to pause shipment during the watch leaned into their complaints with fresh energy. Several found Father and explained eloquently that commerce cannot operate under the tyranny of children's notions about lanterns. Father listened until their indignation ran out of breath, then said, "Bring me your ledgers in the morning. If your loss is real, we will account it. If it is emotion, keep it for your wives." He said it kindly enough that they didn't have to be offended unless it made them feel important. Several chose to be important. He let them.
We stayed until the moon had moved from one side of the cathedral spire to the other. The river softened. The chimes forgot their duty and became decoration again. The wardens leaned, laughed, became humans whose jokes kept their fear from becoming arrogant. Rook sent me home with a thump between the shoulders that approximated affection. Father remained on the wall, hands behind his back, counting the sort of cost you can't write down.
Mother was waiting at the side door, not because she worried—though she did—but because she is a woman who believes in being the first face you see when you come out of a night that could have become a story. She took my hand and turned it palm up, saw the little crescent marks the stone had left in my skin. "Were you useful?" she asked.
"Marginally."
"That's how usefulness begins," she said, and kissed my knuckles once the way women kiss the heads of sleeping children to remind themselves the world hasn't yet finished stealing.
I slept and dreamed not of gates or lanterns, but of numbers read aloud into a square where soup steamed and the river did not argue with the shore.
In the morning, Lunaris counted its small wins. The drydock crew drank coffee with the outrage of men who had been denied the right to be heroic and had to settle for being competent. An apprentice with a Book Sigil wrote last night's events into an official ledger in a hand so neat it made my teeth ache. The Solharan scholar came by the parapet to measure the new lantern distances and muttered, "Interesting," like a man who has just discovered his theory can survive being laughed at.
I ran errands Father hadn't assigned. At the healing hall, I carried in a bundle of cushions without comment. The boy with the brave posture had one eye the color of half-ripe plums. He grinned at me like we were sharing a joke about violence that neither of us found funny. At the chandler's we returned the roster with three neat notes in the margin suggested "for consideration." The guildmistress read them without flinching and said, "We'll test," which is as much as anyone should ever want to hear from a professional.
At the quay, a merchant with lemon-scented irritation accosted me because he could not find Father to accost. "Do you know who I am?"
"No," I said. "But I know what you're carrying."
"What?"
"Rot," I said. "Because you kept your crates on the quay during red tide instead of lowering them into the cool. Complain or adapt, sir. The river doesn't read your invoices."
It was unwise. It was not kind. But sometimes a child is allowed to try out the weight of an adult sentence to see if he should grow into it. He sputtered, found no purchase on my age, and turned to find a target who would give him the satisfaction of a fight. I wrote the moment down later with less pride than I felt at the time.
In the afternoon, Father set three ledgers on the table and left the room. Mother poured tea as if we weren't about to look directly at the way our city fed itself. I compared numbers until my eyes crossed and then uncrossed. Patterns rose. Prices curved. A name repeated too often in the oversight column blinked at me until I blinked back. I wrote it in my second notebook because it felt like the kind of fact that prefers dusk.
When Father returned, he tapped the marginalia I'd made. "This one."
"I don't know what it means yet."
"Good," he said. "Then it hasn't lied to you. We'll find out whose cousin he is and why he likes night deliveries."
"And if he's just diligent?"
"Then he'll keep being paid," Father said. "Diligent men are rare enough that we needn't invent crimes for them."
We ate in the comfortable quiet of people who had created a small order out of a night that had intended otherwise. After, I went to my room and opened the first notebook.
Public accounting changes posture.
Symmetry is a polite invitation to catastrophe.
If you forbid panic its rhythm, it grows bored and leaves.
I paused, then opened the second notebook and wrote, smaller:
He fears for me when the river leans. She fears for me when the doorbell rings. I am learning which fear I should be faithful to.
I slept with my window cracked to let the river's breath teach me how to time my own. The city turned in its sleep like an honest man rolling over to ease an ache. Morning would come. There would be more errands that look like nothing—candles, cushions, ledgers, lanterns—and the kind of arithmetic that keeps a place from unraveling. Somewhere beyond the parapet, a wider world waited with its practiced cruelties. I would meet it when my feet could carry more weight than pride. For now, I added small numbers correctly and kept my hands open where I could.
The bells took their time with dawn. I counted the doors that opened without swinging and the faces that forgot they had been afraid last night. I pressed my palm to the same stretch of parapet as yesterday and felt the stone remember us. The memory felt like a promise the city had made without knowing it had spoken.